This M.F.A. thesis paper and exhibition explore the ephemerality of relationships as they are redefined by contiguity and recontextualization. My work derives from an investigation of alternative interpretive structures while retaining an overarching sense of narrative. This approach to painting relies on the human propensity to create organization in order to contend with chaos or overwhelming amounts of information. Traced back to curiosity cabinets or wunderkammers and forward through museums and encyclopedias, the organization of knowledge in both its diachronic and synchronic forms serves to collapse time and space. Geography and chronology become obsolete as relationships between images and objects gain new contexts. This recontextualization is not momentary but continual, as objects and images move through time and are replicated, appropriated and assimilated. Particularly in this digital age, that distance from the original is expanded in such a way as to make relationships truly ephemeral. A painting that derives from a print-out of a JPEG, which was beamed across the globe after being digitized from a photograph of an object already taken out of time and geography by those who placed it in a museum is extraordinarily distant from its original context. The ensuing abstraction changes the image irrevocable; it is a new thing entirely and only an echo of the former context remains. These paintings are filled with echoes but the true narrative is that of the ephemeral relationships that are fixed on the page for a just a moment and then disappear into the continuously shifting stream of context.